"Frida Kahlo's 1940 painting The Dream (The Bed) is no ordinary work of art. And the recent auction where it fetched $54.66 million, making it the most expensive artwork by a woman ever sold at auction, proves it. Behind this representation, which, according to Sotheby's, encapsulates her lifelong preoccupation with mortality, physicality, and the emotional complexities of selfhood, lies a story that describes the painting's abrupt departure from Mexico, against the backdrop of a romantic disappointment."
"Professor Luis-Martin Lozano, a historian of Mexican and Latin American art, explains in a video call with EL PAIS that the artwork, which he describes as a complex self-portrait, left the country between the 1940s and 1950s, before the government decree in 1984 that declared Frida Kahlo's complete works an Artistic Monument of the Nation and prohibited the export of her creations."
The Dream (The Bed), painted by Frida Kahlo in 1940, sold at auction for $54.66 million, becoming the most expensive artwork by a woman sold at auction. The painting encapsulates lifelong preoccupations with mortality, physicality, and the emotional complexities of selfhood. The work left Mexico between the 1940s and 1950s, before a 1984 government decree that declared Kahlo's complete works an Artistic Monument and prohibited their export. Kahlo painted the work as a gift for American photographer Nickolas Muray, her lover for ten years, and intended to dispose of it after Muray announced plans to marry in 1939. Those years were marked by personal turmoil: Kahlo returned from Paris in 1939, Diego Rivera asked for a divorce, and the couple navigated an open relationship with multiple affairs. Kahlo also achieved professional success during this period, selling works in a New York solo exhibition and having a painting acquired by the Louvre, while Muray provided emotional support.
Read at english.elpais.com
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